A Clay County School Board member ostracized for posting comments about Back people online is suing the city of Jacksonville, where he’s a firefighter, for disciplining him over those remarks.
Robert Alvero was summoned to Florida’s Board of Education to explain what then-Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas called “discriminatory comments” in December 2025. Leadership in Clay County’s Republican Party called on Alvero to quit the School Board after recording a video that said he’d “had 80% more negative experience with the African American community in this country than with white people.”
But a lawsuit Alvero filed September 22 in federal court argued Jacksonville’s Fire and Rescue Department shouldn’t have reprimanded him and made that
discipline part of his employee record.
“The public was free to criticize… Other elected officials were free to criticize,” said the lawsuit, while remarking elsewhere that Alvero “does not ask this court to endorse his statements. He asks this court to enforce the constitutional line between public criticism of speech and government retaliation against the speaker.”
The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger to rule that the reprimand violated Alvero’s First Amendment free-speech rights and order the city to remove it from his employee record.
In March, Alvero received the Fire and Rescue Department’s written reprimand, which said that a video posted on Facebook “contains language that is racially insensitive and can be perceived as disparaging toward African American individuals.”
The reprimand notice told Alvero to go to race training and wrote that “Your conduct erodes public confidence in the Department's ability to serve all residents impartially, and potentially creates an offensive working environment that is disruptive.”
Alvero disputed the agency’s conclusion, filing a response that said the video “was made up of short clips taken out of a much longer recording, removing the context necessary to understand what I was actually saying. In the full video, I discussed cultural differences and how misunderstandings shaped my personal experiences.”
Alvero appealed to Jacksonville’s Civil Service Board but the panel upheld the reprimand on September 16, following a hearing that included testimony from Fire Chief Percy Golden.
The chief “determined that Alvero’s statements were discriminatory, harmful to workplace cohesion, and damaging to JFRD operations because firefighters work, eat, and sleep in close quarters during 24-hour shifts and must rely on one another in dangerous, high-stress situations,” the board’s decision said. ”Alvero’s remarks undermined morale, strained working relationships, and threatened the unity required for effective emergency response.”
No action had been scheduled by September 24 on Alvero's lawsuit.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Chastised for racial remarks, firefighter/Clay School Board member sues
